Abstract

Two traditions in philosophy quarrel over the claim of metaphor to sense, reference, and truth value. Is it empty or full of meaning, positive or negative in its tagging, true or false in its predication? Analytic logic banishes metaphor from default language in order to fix truth between the limits of contradiction and tautology. Dialectic logic welcomes its possibilities into a dynamic measure of truth, opening language to figurative as well as negative yields. This dissertation explores the surprises and defeats of metaphor--first by establishing the shared subject-predicate logic of literal and figurative identity statements, found in the debate between Hegel and Russell; second by demonstrating the strange fate of nonidentity in a positivist world, based on literary tales of totalizing tropes; third by considering the politics of gender representation, drawn from feminist scholarship in linguistics and philosophy. The crux of metaphor, like the riddle of the sphinx, operates at the level of grammar and ideology. Tennyson's ladies, Ruskin's queens, and Wilde's dancers are born out of the tropic power of Hegel's pregnant copula. Because his best case for identity-in-difference turns out to be the lost cause of metaphor, these "manufactured maidens" of nineteenth century literature perish or rule on the value of their secondary status--eliminable as marked nouns in a masculine grammar, essential as limiting cases of a logical proof. It is no accident that these tropes are women, dutiful or disobedient daughters of a man-made language. The female sex has always served as a metaphor for trouble. When a manufactured maiden faces herself across the copula of a sentence--here a subject, there a sign--she riddles the is of identity on the is of predication, embodying the terms of the quarrel between Hegel and Russell, for if her agreement as a sign to its referent achieves full correspondence, a substitution of one-to-one, then representation surpasses itself and becomes another instance of identity. Whatever it is, she is--the measure of a name for Tennyson, the history of an etymon for Ruskin, the condition of music for Wilde